The Unfinished Business In Happy Valley

(This piece first published in the  October 2012 edition of VOICES of Central Pensylvania)



 

The World Turned Upside Down

Sometimes really, really, really smart people fail at the most basic governance responsibilities. Consider the now retired Dr. Robert Jaedicke, a widely respected accounting professor and former dean of Stanford Business School. These days, he serves in volunteer governance roles such as the Board of Advisors for Montana State University and President of the Yellowstone Park Foundation. However, during his brilliant academic career, he sat on several corporate boards, where his name and fame brought legitimacy to corporations across the USA. One of these outside gigs was as the Chairman of the Audit Committee for a major utility trader, Enron.

While never implicated in criminal activity, his governance role on the Enron board brought Jaedicke a Congressional subpoena, where he testified that even as Audit Chair he knew nothing of Enron’s peculiar transactions or opaque accounting practices. Jaedicke’s statements so angered noted management author Tom Peters (In Search Of Excellence), that he repudiated his own Stanford MBA and returned his diploma to the esteemed university.  

“When the guy who headed Stanford Business School, the last bastion of bean-counting, invokes the “Clueless” defense, it makes you wonder about the value of a Stanford degree,” Peters said.

The Jaedicke experience is informative when considering people like Spanier, Curley, Shultz and Paterno. While the Sandusky Scandal is about the sexual abuse of young boys, the Penn State Scandal is about the collapse of principled leadership. Even deeper, with all revelations about the scores of civic, government, business and academic leaders in the region who knew major parts of what was happening for years and years , we might want to call it the Happy Valley Scandal. At its core, the Happy Valley Scandal is about culture that left so many good people morally blind.    

As with Robert Jaedicke, we’ve repeatedly been offered the ‘Clueless’ Defense. How is it that so many knew so much, yet no one had a clue? What happened with Sandusky should have been stopped almost as soon as it started. The systematic cover-up that ensued occurred precisely because the leadership of the Second Mile, Penn State and other civic institutions allowed a culture of idolatry to flourish. The status of the football program and late coach Joe Paterno had reached such gargantuan heights that fear of shedding light on the scandal dissuaded many from saying anything. Happy Valley had a culture so entrenched that it cavalierly overlooked the degradation of its young.

Driving home this point is the tale of the janitor, James Calhoun. After witnessing Sandusky performing oral sex on a boy in the locker room in November 2001, the visibly shaken Calhoun discussed it that night with several of his fellow janitorial staff. They did not report the matter out of concern for their jobs. As one testified it, “would have been like going against the President of the United States.” One can hardly disagree with that observation. In a culture of such football idolatry, a mere victim or an observant employee doesn’t really stand a chance.

How ascendant the football program became is illustrated by the well-known tale of when PSU leadership did try to exert some influence over football. Recall the 2004 visit to the Paterno home by Chair of the Trustees Steven Garban and President Graham Spanier. They went seeking the coach’s retirement. As revealed in the just published biography, Paterno kicked them out of the house while telling the two, “You take care of your playground, I’ll take care of mine”. On the organizational chart, Paterno served under Spanier and Garban. In real life, something quite different. 

To understand how deviant this situation had become, the question was recently put to a roundtable of business CEOs and nonprofit Executive Directors, “If you and your Board Chair went to an employee to seek their retirement, and got the response ‘You take care of your playground, I’ll take care of mine’, what would you do?” Not surprisingly, the consensus was that the employee would be immediately terminated. But not Paterno. In this culture, Spanier and Garban readily abdicated their governance responsibilities. As one CEO noted, the story “gives lie to the notion Joe had ANY superiors at that place.”

And it was this culture, this perversion of priorities, this loss of institutional control which was noted again and again in both the Freeh Report and in the subsequent NCAA sanctions. It wasn’t just that the football program drove the university; the football program drove life throughout Happy Valley. There are indications that not much has changed. The largest outpouring of public emotion in this entire affair was not in response to boys being raped or in leaders looking the other way while boys were being raped. No, the fury was over the firing of the coach, the outrage over losing a few scholarships and four bowl games. 

Rather than loudly trumpet the creation of a “Center for the Protection of Children”, the university would do well funneling increased resources into the myriad of Leadership and Ethics centers already existing within many academic programs. Same holds true for our community at large. The rush to create new abuse awareness programs should be coupled with similar initiatives to bolster principled leadership in our government, business and nonprofit sectors. For, if Happy Valley is serious about ‘never again’, it will take more than tossing around a few million, creating a few children’s programs and tearing down a statue.

Over the years, many looked the other way because it was all so lucrative. And the temptation is to continue to focus upon pedophilia and away from leadership because so many continue to make a living having things just the way they always were. This creates a strong desire to ‘move on’ and ‘get back to normal’. However, ‘back to normal’ is not acceptable, for normal was a culture which distorted the judgment of so many.

Still Clueless

 Penn State has tremendous intellectual assets. A few departments are world class, several colleges among the best in the nation and more than a few faculty who are premier in their field. This has not changed and remains unaffected by the events of the past year. If Penn State is a university first, then it will continue to flourish because the foundation of academic strength remains.

But, there is much in the larger community which needs to change as well. You don’t have to agree with all parts of the Freeh Report to understand its basic call to reshape the PSU culture. And by reshaping the university, there is an opportunity to reshape the culture of Happy Valley into one which is less blindly faithful and more morally courageous.
 
Jerry Sandusky did what he did, driven by some soul sickness (and one suspects a childhood history of his own). Call it ‘Evil’ if you wish, but ultimately there was something darker going on with our leaders. These were our neighbors. These were smart, caring men and women who heard the truth, contemplated the truth, deliberated with others about the truth and then made conscious decisions to hide the truth. In this sense, the Freeh Report is correct. We created an abnormal culture in Happy Valley which perverted the thinking of so many good people.

There is no moving on until this culture changes. 

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Michael Brand is a noted author, speaker and coach on issues of governance and leadership in the nonprofit sector. His work can be found at

www.michaelbrand.org. He resides in Bellefonte.

Watch Out Penn Staters, The Worst Is Yet To Come

Hocus-pocus couldn't save Graham this time

Early November, after dispatching Joe Paterno and Graham Spanier, Penn State went into furious spin mode for damage control.  High priced lawyers and PR firms took up residence in Old Main.  Next came the public shoveling of hush money to sexual assault groups like PA Coalition Against Rape (PCAR) and Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN).  The alumni scrambled in fundraising efforts in order to out proclaim each other that “we care”.  Now, with events of the last few days,  the efforts by the university to limit the contagion look likely to fail.

Mike McQueary, the oft slammed underling who was the first known eyewitness to a Sandusky assault, went to the witness stand and described in detail what he saw in that shower back in 2002.   It was either anal sex or simulated anal sex.  On the receiving end of that little act was a boy of about 10.  While McQ didn’t share all the specific gory details with Paterno, the old coach confirms he learned enough to later tell Curley and Shultz it was definitely ‘something sexual’. 

Shultz: A Variant of the Walk Of Shame

No doubt now that Curley/Shultz later quizzed McQ what was meant by ‘something sexual’....you don't get to rise that far up the academic bureaucracy without some pretty good skills at eliciting detailed information from subordinates.  So McQ would have explained that "something sexual" meant anal sex on a 10 year old…be it simulated or the real thing.   Curley/Shultz wiould not have sat on that...you know they went straight to Spanier with this detailed information.  Spanier, in turn, had to have gone straight to a select few members of the Board Of Trustees?   Can there be any doubt that the University’s banning Sandusky from bringing kids into the shower was done after careful strategizing with legal counsel and select  Trustees?  So the knowledge of this goes straight to the top of PSU.

Curley does his own Walk Of Shame

Consider that pedophiles tend to associate with other pedophiles.  So when the AGs office came out and said Second Mile was “grooming” children could it be possible they were groomed for more than just Sandusky?  What if they were business partners or major donors of Penn State?   We have no evidence of such, but would any of you now be surprised if this came to pass?

There are deep Town/Gown relationships in Central Pennsylvania.  In this regard, Penn State is like any other university town…the business elite and the academic elite are bound in a tight web of social and financial networks.  On the Town side of the equation we now know two people had detailed information of  Sandusky’s behavior, John McQueary (Mike’s father) and Dr Jon Dranov.  These two are not just ‘community members’, they are major business players in Happy Valley at the very top of the food chain.  John McQueary and Dr Dranov travel in what passes for elite circles here. If those two knew, more knew.  It is likely that Sandusky was the topic of quiet chatter in the luxury boxes of Beaver Stadium, the golf course or any place else the powers that be met to hob nob.

Which brings us to those on the Second Mile Board of Directors.  A virtual who’s who of Centre County elite mixed in with several national names.  Second Mile Executive Director Jack Rakovitz confirmed Curley told him of the 2002 incident. One suspects Rakovitz shared that info with his wife Kathy Genovese, the Second Mile VP (both have since resigned).  It would be gross negligence of Rakovitz not to have also taken that information to the Board Executive Committee.  Which means we have an even larger group of community members fully aware of what's going on behind closed doors in Happy Valley.

What really goes on behind the closed doors of Happy Valley

Keep in mind that the only reason this all came to light is that Sandusky took his act outside the Penn State/Happy Valley orbit.  It was the Keystone School District in Clinton County (40 miles to the north) which finally made an official report after one of its kids was molested in the school.  One has the nagging sense that if it had occurred in the State College School District, a lot of people would have looked the other way.

In our criminal justice system, the prosecution has a lot of leverage in getting defendants to rat out their higher ups. In this case the AGs can go after the pension payout to Curley/Shultz.  Beyond the criminal penalties. that’s heavy incentive for the those two to cut a deal and start talking.   Don’t kid yourselves, as direct reports to the President’s office they traveled in the rarefied circles of Town and Gown. They know who was doing what.  If Curley/Shultz name names, the bodies will be flying all over the place.

McQueary’s testimony showed us one thing: he’s lawyered up and will not be made the fall guy in all this.  With that, the dominoes begin to fall.  The other players in this tangled web will soon begin to turn on each other.  It is then we'll get a look at how deep this went in Happy Valley.

So my Penn State friends expect things to get worse…….much, much worse.

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